Silflay Hraka

Draft McCain.

Polls indicate that a majority of Americans (near 60 percent in most surveys) oppose gay marriage, but the country seems more evenly split as to whether or not the issue needs to be written into the Constitution. Critics of the president’s proposal, like Senator John McCain, himself a candidate in 2000, cite concerns ranging from the questionable necessity of a constitutional amendment to accusations of human-rights violations against gays.

Because who the hell wants to have to choose between Bush, Kerry and Nader?

Thanks to global warming, the origins of which are still disputed, some are predicting that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef may be no more by 2050.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that global warming will increase sea temperatures by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius this century. At the lower end of this limit, which will be expected only if current greenhouse gas emission rates are reduced significantly, “there will be much more frequent coral bleaching events and coral will become quite rare - down to five per cent of current levels for all of the Great Barrier Reef,” says Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of University of Queensland’s Centre for Marine Studies and co-author of the report.

However, Hoegh-Guldberg also accepts that even under the worst case scenarios the bleaching is geologically temporary in nature.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg accepts that on a geological scale, the GBR will recover. Under the best-case global warming scenario, temperatures will stabilise at the end of this century, and the Reef will recover over the following century. Under the worst, it will take at least 500 years for it to regenerate, populated by corals adapted to living in warmer waters.

Odds are that even the colder water corals that now populate the reef won’t go extinct, thanks to the reproductive cycle of the Barrier Reef corals, which fill the waters around the reef with literally trillions of offspring in October, November and December, and the East Australian Current, of Finding Nemo fame, that sweeps them south into colder waters.

The image above, taken from the sea surface temperature maps available from Rutgers, shows the average worldwide water temperature for the month of March, when the waters near the Great Barrier reef are at their warmest, and the danger of bleaching is at its highest. Should the most severe predictions of warming come about, the average temp would jump from somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 C to 29C, However, the temperatures to the south would also jump, essentially opening up areas to the south for Barrier Reef corals to colonize. Given the relatively quick change in temperature, only fifty years, the new corals would not be the most impressive when it came to size, but there should be plenty of time for them to establish themselves in colder southern waters, if in fact they have not already done so. As is pointed out in the article, worldwide sea temperatures have been warmer in the past than they are now, and corals are still around.

Bring it on, Andrew, bring it on!

You see, it’s all about the votes. At the most, only 3-5% of Americans describe themselves as gay or lesbian. On the other hand, some 50% of Americans describe themselves as Evangelical Christian or Catholic. And gay marriage is an issue which will mobilize them like no other. If just 10% of “conservative Christians” show up at the polls this fall, they will neutralize every gay vote in America.

Some people need to get a life
Asking for visitation rights of a cat is ludicrous and is just another way that the animal rights crowd is trying to give animals equal status with people.

60 Second Update

So I saw this update, on Drudge, headlined “1980 Pound Pig Dies!”

Hey, can you blame me if my first thought was “Michael Moore dead?

Dear John Letter

I also knew a tough old Scot once, who won the British Military Medal in Aden, defending his gun position at bayonet point. When the SAS found his position, he was surrounded by twenty some-odd skewered Arabs, and still conducting firing missions, albeit slowly, given that his whole platoon and his immediate gun crew were dead or gravely wounded. He was a war hero.

You sir - you received a bronze star and a silver star, one for pulling a man out of the water under fire, and the other for chasing a wounded VC into a hut to kill him. No “V” devices there, I notice. Yeah, we know about the three purple hearts for nicks - I’d be impressed, but Al Santoli wrote about officers in ‘Nam getting purple hearts for stubbing their toes running for bunkers during mortar attacks. So no, I’m not impressed. Nor am I impressed by the couple acts of relative bravery - I’d wager that damn near every infantryman exposed to fire in Viet Nam did a lot more than that, for a lot less fruit salad.